Oracle Audit Vault has improved our compliance reporting.

• Audit data collection from diverse sources.
• Integrations with third-party products.
• ecurity event reporting (malicious activity and hacking attempts).
• Monitoring everything from one place.
• SQL workload monitoring

This will improve your infrastructure and make it secure for sure.

Some major improvements in organizational operations:

• Our organization has a complete alert and control mechanism to identify unauthorized access of PROD databases.
• Compliance with United States government security and audit standards.
• Proactive control of audited parameters, like failed log-on attempts, to avoid Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
• Improved management awareness about database compliance metrics using Audit Vault.

Generally, security is enhanced and monitoring traffic and data became possible using this solution rather than others. You can audit and configure notifications so that you get notified when somebody accesses particular objects within the database. It's one of the key features. 

Auditing as an imperative function of any Enterprise company. We require the audit logs for compliance needs and for tighter control of the infrastructure. Being in the Health Insurance industry and handling PHI & PII data, there are compliance mandates enforced by HIPAA. Oracle audit Vault helps us implement the control points enlisted under "Audit Requirements". HIPAA mandates us to track any/all access to ePHI data in our system, even if it is just a READ ONLY access. With Oracle Audit Vault, we have a centralized system to access all Audit Trails for sensitive data access.

Before this product was used in the company, the tables with some critical presets were checked with the triggers on them. The old and new versions of the changing records were written to another table. These triggers caused the database system to incur extra CPU and IO spending. It was also difficult to maintain and manage. We were also unable to provide a wide variety of reports that the audit department wanted.

By using the product, we could log the audit records, generate various reports, send these reports to the relevant administrators by attaching these reports to the mail, without exposing the main database system too much. In this way, it has contributed to accelerate the business processes of the company by providing audit trail requests much faster.

This solution acts as a complete data warehouse for our audit data. Anytime we need to search for details about what happened, from a proactive monitoring perspective, or react to see what access permissions were granted or denied, we can look at this.

We have an alert mechanism implemented, and we also use some of the built-in reports. The reports are typically used by management, and we have a risk management dashboard. Management looks at the reports, and the indicators in them, to determine what level the security has been at over the past month. They can tell whether it has improved or gone down.

We were implementing this solution for our client, who was required to do PCI compliance. Their project was initially scheduled to run over a year and a half, but by just deploying this product they were able to do the compliance reports within three months, so the time to roll out was quite significant. The time was very short, which meant the turnaround time for compliance was much shorter and the value was realized, so that is one positive aspect that we experienced with our clients.

It provides reports that are directly related to the compliance issues, i.e., for example SOX Compliance.

After we activate Oracle Audit Vault, our clients can see all of their past actions or the wrong activity done on the network. We can load most of the diagnostics for the business.

AVDF not only has an audit function, but it also has a database firewall function that protects the database, which is an important company asset, from external attacks typified by SQL injection. It supports a wide range of databases (Oracle Database, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server and so on).

By integrating two major functions (auditing and database firewall)
into a single product, it became easier to use and the scope is really wide.

It has provided us with a unique opportunity to automate risk discovery.

The system provides both an audit system and a security solution through the database firewall that protects the data and databases being accessed.

The system uses BU internal risk management and audit teams for ease of IT and systems audits.

Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall expands protection beyond Oracle and third party databases with support for auditing the operating system, directories and custom sources. Our client needed a product which can provide a holistic approach to the whole enterprise in terms of security, monitoring and auditing security which is exactly what this product provided.

It took the onus off of the database and put it on a separate machine.

Information technology outsourcing: Audit Vault and Database Firewall has helped us in many ways; specifically, to restrict and control access to data. It also has helped us identify/recover from many accidental transactions. The product has helped us to organize and monitor different applications and their transactions.

Using the features provided by this product, we have implemented restrictions on data access for individual users accessing the application to perform activities on the database. Restrictions/monitoring can be configured for column/row level as well. With Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall, you can create alerts for suspicious activity, create changes to privileged users, create historical reports on schema changes and data-level access. Audit Vault also can audit OS and network events. It can also be used to audit other databases (such as MYSQL, IBM, etc.) and databases in the cloud.

I am in the training field and I can express my views based on that experience only. This is a configuration-based product that offers you full control of the audit settings and the configurations. It helps in generating all the required reports as per the compliance. It even helps in customizing the reports as per your choice.

There are multiple banks that are either using it or they are going to implement this tool in the Asian and African countries. They are attaching it to their core banking system. The latest version for Audit Vault is 12c and some of the valuable features are:

• Audit logs are now out of reach: Superusers (SYS), DBAs and OS Admins can’t remove them.

• Logs are completely safe in the warehouse: Encrypted and protected by the DB vault.

• Faster access to logs: Partitioning is available.
• Alert configuration (email-based, desktop)

• High availability of the log server: Limited use of the RAC option.

• Compliance-based reporting with attestation option. Customization is also possible.

• Works transparently with the application. No coding required.

I haven’t used this product at my current job but I implemented it at a couple of other organizations, as a technical consultant. What they really wanted to do was to be able to check who is doing what with their sensitive data and they achieved that.

Out-of-the-box policies ensure our compliance with standards like SOX, ISO 27001, and so on.

It provides us with access protection. It gives audit access to the data that the user doesn't have permission to access.

Before we implemented this product, our client had to query the database to create an audit report. With this product, audit report generation is automated.

We are the implementers of the product to our clients.